Thanksgiving, 2012

“In everything give thanks: for this is the will of God in Christ Jesus concerning you.” 1 Thess. 5:17-19

McDonald’s has drilled it into us that we deserve a break today, or any day. Pro-Active skin cream tells us that we deserve clear skin. TV lawyers tell us that if we or a loved one suffers from a host of ailments that we are entitled to certain benefits. Football fans feel they have a right to expect winning seasons from their alma maters. Banks and other businesses remind us regularly of our rights to privacy in all business dealings. College students feel entitled to certain minimum grades for showing up to class and warming a seat. If pressed, we all have expectations, rights, and privileges which we feel are coming to us as a result of either our status, age, sex, zip code, citizenship, or blood type. We exist! We are entitled!

There is one serious casualty with this kind of thinking. Gratitude gets totally pushed off the stage when entitlement shows up. If we feel we are owed the corner office, then when it comes our way we find it difficult to muster those gracious feelings of thanksgiving and gratitude which should accompany such a gift. If we “earned” it and “deserve” it, the whole concept of looking at it as a gift is gone. Compare that to receiving an unexpected blessing, a gift that we had no idea was coming our way. There is joy. There is this thrill of receiving something which we had not earned or was owed to us.

I was biking along a very remote stretch of highway up in some national forest lands one day and was turning around to head back towards home. I had not gone twenty feet when I spotted something by the side of the road. It looked suspiciously like money. Closer observation confirmed to my surprise that a clean, crisp, and totally unclaimed $10.00 bill lay there in the weeds for the taking. I claimed it as a gift, a totally unexpected blessing and reward for my biking exertions of the day. It did not make me a rich man. It would not even pay my gas bill home. But it was a truly unexpected gift. That made it so exciting. I could not wait to tell others about it. And it was a special joy to spend it that very day on some trivial lunch fare. I even had to tell the clerk where it came from. Silly, really, how much joy could come from such small change.

What if I were to sit down to my table every day and look upon my bowl of cereal in the morning and see it as a gift? What have I done to deserve this simple blessing when so many in the world go for days with little or nothing to eat? How many people have touched this product with their investment of time, fortune, and creative energies whereby I get to enjoy the simple pleasures of eating that which I could never create or make on my own? Oh yes, I earned the money to purchase the milk and Cheerios. But even this medium and system of exchange is so far beyond my understanding and remains complicated beyond belief. I am the beneficiary of a country that provides all this built on a sustained currency, a system of laws and government, and upon the spilt blood of thousands who have come before. There is no such thing as my money buying my food for independent me without touching a chain of events and people stretching coast to coast with a cast of thousands.

Even what health and strength is ours to get up and walk through another day is a gift, and we have no right to expect it to continue uninterrupted day after day. Every breath we take is a gift of life itself. Our miraculous five senses are an incredible gift from our creator that bring color, taste, music, texture, and sweet smells into an otherwise very, very bland existence. What would happen if we looked around this Thanksgiving at everything as an undeserved gift? I would suspect that it would be a sure way to drive off the Grinch of entitlement and multiply and magnify our joy. May your Thanksgiving be filled with joy.

Mercy and Truth, Mr. Moe